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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absorbing search for the last 'tiger', September 20, 2000
I have read many contemporary Australian novels in the past few years, and this was one of the most interesting. Its immediate subject is the search for a living specimen of the apparently extinct thylacine or Tasmanian `tiger'. The main character, Martin David or M, has been hired by biotechnological interests to secure a living specimen of the thylacine which he can then kill and clone. As he searches for the animal, he is confronted with an unexpected obstacle: the domesticity represented by Lucy Armstrong, the woman with whom he is lodging, and her two odd children Bike and Sass. Jarrah Armstrong, the husband and father of the family, has vanished in the same mountains where M is pursuing his quarry; M feels a double identification with Jarrah as he faces the same risks in the wild as did his predecessor. In addition he feels the danger, or the promise, of being co-opted into Jarrah's domestic role. Though M is attracted to Lucy and has warm feelings for the children, he warily holds on to his own male solitude, an allegiance also figured in his response to the femininity of the last thylacine itself. This is a vivid, compelling narrative whose significance does not just reside in its own details. It clearly is an allegory of `globalization', where M is the metropolitan outsider seeking to exploit the environment, and the nature and people of Tasmania represent a local particularity in danger of being absorbed into the global. The paradox here is that the global cannot operate without the content, the materiality, provided by the local. So M and the global concerns he represent NEED Tasmania, and the thylacine, even as they try to exploit it for the purposes of the global machine. The writing here is so vividly pictorial that these intellectual issues never tower above the novel's exciting plot. They are there for those who are interested, but on its own strength Julia Leigh's novel is a gripping read full of both adventure and mystery.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Grim., February 6, 2001
Those who say this book resonates long after they have finished it are correct, but it resonates because its message is so bleak, even hopeless. And one suspects that the author is intentionally playing with the reader here by turning "quest fiction" on its head to make a point about those who would not only despoil Nature for profit, but make a conscious decision to sacrifice compassion and the essence of humanity in the process.
Martin David, which may or may not be his real name, is in search of the thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger which may be extinct. In no sense of the word a "hero," Martin is being highly paid by a corporation to find the last tiger and to extract the DNA which can be used to clone it, and he is so obsessed with fulfilling his mission that he becomes virtually a hunting machine, being referred to not by his name, but simply as M. During days that he is not hunting, however, he stays with the Armstrong family, dysfunctional since the disappearance of the father, Jarrah Armstrong, and we see some niggling traces of humanity as M begins to respond to the two wonderful, resilient Armstrong children, desperately in need of his help.
In other "quest fiction," such as Faulkner's The Bear, we can distinguish between hunter and prey and gain some enlightenment about the role of man in the universe by observing the hunter's respect for his prey as it grows during the duration of the hunt. Here, however, the edges are blurred. Our view of whether M or the thylacine is really the hunter changes, as does our understanding of which is the more ruthless, and which, if either, triumphs during the hunt. Though the prose is brutally compelling and the sense of drama very high, the message here feels like a message, and it is very grim. This reader wished that it were the M's of this world who were extinct. Mary Whipple
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling, hypnotic, uncompromising, January 20, 2001
By A Customer
This short novel pulls no punches. It is beautifully written, and I note that the author has received praise from no less than Don DeLillo: "a strong and hypnotic piece of writing". Leigh's descriptions of the Tasmanian wilderness transport the reader into another world. Haven't read a survival story - physical, emotional, ecological - like it.
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